Fuzzed out alt-punk—with a sword
Album art is, often, sort of an afterthought. Even particularly good albums can sometimes fail to capture anything meaningful or compelling for the visual component of this, admittedly, primarily heard artform. Not so with Huxlii’s Odds and Ends, but Mostly Ends, which shows Sabrina Carrizo Sztainbok in nearly knee-high fur boots, a dress that might have been made out of army fatigues, and, well, fucking armor and a sword. She’s sitting, saintlike, looking up to the heavens, or the ceiling of the metro station staircase she’s sitting on. Everything about this cover rules, and it gives a phenomenal insight into the record you’re about to hear, a brush of fantasy with the grit and grime of the underground.
The opening track opens as well as any album could hope to, the drum machine and bass groove riding along with Sztainbok’s vocals delivering a perfectly coy opening hinting at depths beneath.
So this is it
did a triple backflip trick
out of your life
With the start of the first chorus, we get jumped by fuzzed-up guitars and the sonic space really opens up. There’s an energy to her production choices here that will have you spinning the song over again just to hear each little moment that grabs you again and again. It’s a tricky piece of songwriting, managing to make the transitional moments between sections catchy, but Huxlii nails it.
The second song, Pretty Boys Don’t Die, is softer than So This is It, but even its gentler groove has a fair share of distortion, but the band’s playing with restraint here, letting the songwriting be the center.
I had another dream last night and I know it’s cliche / but it really happened
Maybe it’s just because the world is currently full of this sort of thing, things happen that, if you wrote it into a novel or a television show, people would have notes about believability and realism. Sometimes the cliche things happen because, well, it happens to a lot of us. Falling in love, having bad dreams, watching the sun go down—are these things less meaningful because they happen a lot?
Huxlii’s use of what sounds like standard preset electronic drums gives these songs such fascinating character, and the tracks are better for it. The beat used in the opening of this song, and using this sound on a song in 6/8 time, is super romantic and evocative. Then there’s this Blade Runner bass synth thing going on beneath the are-we-at-a-sad-dance-scene-in-a-teenage-prom-murder-movie vocals coming from Sabrina and it all adds up to a phenomenal middle point in this record. It’s very let’s fall in love and then die in a car accident together.
The high fantasy hints are sprinkled throughout this record, the hints of 80s psychedelic film scores in some of the instrumentation, and imagery in some of the music:
You know I’m not some kind of a warrior
I could tell you the names
By now they’d sound foreign
I’ve been a bad bad knight
So I’ll say good mourning
Fans of Ecca Vandal would love this EP—and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see them on a bill together sometime in the future.
Written by Willow Stonebeck
